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what could be expected from a studio whose staff was made up largely of young men, most of whom, like Disney himself, had almost no formal art training, and limited formal education of any kind. Like so many schoolboys, the Disney animators ate their sack lunches behind the stage where Disney had filmed the live action for the
Alice
comedies. They also played horseshoes there—“Ub was the best,” Jackson recalled. 23
    Some of Disney’s animators had fallen in love with the medium when they were children, seeing what must have been some of the earliest series cartoons, like those of J. R. Bray. Jackson remembered growing up in Glendale, California:
    We lived near the [trolley] tracks . . . and the conductors would tear all the transfers off, and they’d have a little stub left, about, oh, three quarters of an inch thick and half an inch wide, with a rivet through the middle, or a staple. But the ends you could flip, and so you could make any kind of a little drawing there, and make it move. So I used to walk up and down the car tracks, finding the stubs where they’d thrown them, and make my animation on those. 24
    In the expansive atmosphere created by the Disney cartoons’ success and the growth of the staff, some of Disney’s young animators tinkered with ways to improve their work—for example, by shooting some of their pencil animation on film to see if it was turning out the way they hoped. The animators made such
pencil tests
of “isolated actions within a scene when the animator came up against some new problem and wanted to see how effectively—or otherwise—he was handling it before going ahead,” Jackson said. 25 In addition, Dick Lundy said, the animators tested cycles; it was particularly important to catch any mistakes in cycle animation, because the same mistake would be seen on the screen over and over again. 26 Walt Disney neither encouraged nor discouraged such tests. “We were allowed to use short ends of film that weren’t long enough to shoot a scene with . . . if we wanted to come back at night and develop them ourselves,” Jackson said. 27
    By the late summer of 1929, both Iwerks and Gillett were performing all the functions of directors, Iwerks for the
Silly Symphonies
and Gillett for the
Mickey Mouse
cartoons. Disney called them “story men” because they were responsible for their cartoons’ stories, although that was the area where Disney himself continued to be most heavily involved. The two directors now made the layout drawings that showed the animators how to stage their scenes, and they worked with Stalling to prepare the bar sheets and exposure sheets. 28
    As Disney’s involvement in the details of production receded, he began paying more attention to how he might improve his cartoons and achieve more of the “quality” he had fastened on as a crucial asset in the competition for audiences. Since the Laugh-O-gram days, he had been concerned with the poor drawing skills so evident in his cartoons and in most others, and in late 1929 he struck a deal with the Chouinard Art Institute, a school in downtown Los Angeles, to admit his employees to Friday-night classes.
    That arrangement continued for several years. Disney’s interest in the classes was no doubt sincere—he drove some of his employees to and from the school—but here, just as much as when he was a fledgling animator at Kansas City Film Ad, inertia was a powerful foe. Jack Zander, a Chouinardstudent in the late 1920s and early 1930s, remembered that as a duty under his working scholarship—this was probably in 1930, a year or so after the Disney people started attending Friday-night classes—“I had to walk around and monitor the classes and be sure everybody was there. It was my job to stay there at night and check on the Disney guys. He had about twenty guys there, and nobody wanted to go to the